Articles
Masturbation, Credit and the Novel During the Long Eighteenth Century
Thomas W. Laqueur
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I want to begin by asking my readers to take seriously a simile in the most cited anti-masturbatory tract of all time—the Treatise on the Curse of Onan—written, first in Latin, in 1758, by the distinguished Genevan physician and friend of Rousseau's, Samuel August Tissot. "The self-polluter, perpetually abandoned to his obscene meditations," he writes, "is, in this regard, something in the case of the man of letters, who fixes all his attention on one point. . ." The connection between literature and autoerotic pleasures will be developed later. For now, it is enough to know that, medically speaking, we are dealing with an entirely novel subject. In fact, the advent of modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history: on or about Jan 1, 1712, the anonymous author of Onania not only named but actually invented a new disease. Whoever he was, he succeeded in definitively linking the sin of Onan - spilling his seed upon the ground rather than into his sister-in-law–not, as it had been, with coitus interruptus but with another practice.
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Pathological Honesty: Truth and Self in Rousseau and Nietzsche
Margot Harrison
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The Critique of Truth
Who wants to know the truth? Nietzsche's query (which is perhaps less rhetorical, and hence less irreverent, than it seems) emanates from what we might call a "Romantic moment" in the history of the concept of truth. We can approach this moment by saying that somewhere in the eighteenth century "truth" begins to refer insistently, inexorably to a subject. For if Kant cuts back the truth a subject can possess to the boundaries of its "pathological" sensory experience, his followers read him as thereby reinforcing the Socratic imperative to know the truth of one's pathology: to know oneself. The question of the truth thus becomes inextricable from that of the truthfulness of the one who wants to know it: how rigorously, how consistently is this want (or will) expressed? Truth becomes sincerity, the reciprocal determination of the self by truth (as goal) and the truth by self, and as such it is deployed throughout the later eighteenth century as a guarantee for the validity of personal narrative.
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St. Augustine, the Narrative Self, and the Invention of Fiction
Isaac Miller
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This paper is an attempt to interject a historical moment into the debate on the status of narrative. Perhaps ironically, the issue has had its strongest impact in the field of history, where the term "history" contains a semantic ambiguity between past events themselves and narrative accounts of those events. And yet, historians reflecting on the properties of narrative representation tend to step outside of their field to do so. Such reflections are "metahistorical." Philosophers interested in the status of narrative more frequently begin with the intimate domain of the self, and from there work out to the world. Although there is no necessary connection, if some sense of narrative coherence is inilliminable from personal identity, then perhaps it has some ontological claim within larger units of history as well.
The interjection I am proposing does not so much negotiate between the various positions shaping this debate, as it attempts to locate a particular moment when, and the conditions under which, consideration of the status of narrative entered into self-conscious articulation.
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"An Utterly Dark Spot": The Fiction of God in Bentham's Panopticon
Miran Božovič
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In the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which is strongly reminiscent of Leibniz's Theodicy, Bentham writes:
“All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil. Upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.”
Here, Bentham is clearly influenced by Leibniz's theory of evil. For Leibniz, God allows le mal moral, moral evil, only because he knows that at some point in the future it will give rise to an incomparably greater good, a good that, in the absence of this evil, would not have come about. Thus, for instance, God permitted the crime of Sextus because he knew that this crime would serve "for great things": it was precisely this crime that led to the founding of a great empire which provided mankind with "noble examples." If this crime had not taken place, the greater good itself - the great empire, noble examples - would also not have occurred; and the moment "the smallest evil that comes to pass in the world were missing in it, it would no longer be this world.”
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A Remembrance of Amos Funkenstein
The Editors
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The name of Amos Funkenstein has begun to appear more regularly in qui parle, sometimes in notes, again in critical debate, and now finally as a contributor with this article on terrorism. Although some of our readers may not be familiar with his work—his influence on these pages has been as quietly substantial as his effect on the Berkeley campus - it should be obvious from the following essay that his work speaks to scholars far outside his own fields of Jewish history, medieval intellectual history, theology, and the philosophy and history of science. It is with some sadness that we publish this essay. Professor Funkenstein gave it to the journal only months before his death in November, and as such it is a token of what many of his students and colleagues at Berkeley would recognize as his particular intellectual generosity. We would thus like to mark the publication of this piece with a few remarks about this singular scholar and teacher, if only to remind those who know and tell others who might not of his considerable contributions to his students, the Berkeley campus, and the international community of scholars.
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Terrorism and Theory
Amos Funkenstein
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The Novelty of Terrorism
Some theoretical implications of terrorism are the subject of my following, rather haphazard remarks. Not being an expert in the matter, my point of view will be an outside one; its only advantage may be the opportunity to locate discussions about terrorism within the history of political theories. I shall deal more with the terrorism by the state than with terrorism against it, though the difference between them, from the vantage point I will be taking, is negligible. Let me start, then, with the issue of modernity - the novelty of terrorism. That the phenomenon was a new one was sensed by contemporaneous as well as later observers of the revolutionary reign of terror. Indeed, the excesses of the committee of public safety seem to have been the source for a paradigm shift in theoretical considerations of the role and meaning of terror in the fabric of organized society. But why?
First and foremost because political terror lost its intelligibility at the peak of the reign of terror. Until then, it posed no riddle to its observers. For as long as political theories exist, it was conceived as a necessary corollary to the wielding of power, whereby considerations of utility were sometimes mixed and sometimes separated from considerations of origin.
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Cover text: : Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. -Lucretius
Volume 8.2 is available at JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.